Archive for the 'Africa' Category

During the four-day siege in Kenya’s Westgate shopping Mall al-Shabaab jihadists raped, tortured, beheaded, dismembered, castrated, gouged out eyes, amputated fingers and hung hostages on hooks from the roof. According to a forensic medical doctor, “They [the al-Shabaab attackers] removed eyes, ears, noses. Fingers are cut by pliers, noses ripped by pliers”… “Those are not allegations. Those are f****** truths,”… “They removed balls, eyes, ears, nose. They get your hand and sharpen it like a pencil then they tell you to write your name with the blood. They drive knives inside a child’s body. Actually, if you look at all the bodies, unless those ones that were escaping, fingers are cut by pliers, the noses are ripped by pliers.” There were also reports that hostages were beheaded and their heads thrown out of the windows.

The Obama administration lies, feigns horror, ignores history (especially recent history), and purposely chooses to make the wrong conclusions. Obama panders to Islamists, nationally and internationally. Mistakes are piling up on other previous mistakes, quickly forgotten, and then repeated with reckless abandon. The theatre of the absurd is taking place before our eyes with implications that have far reaching impact on America for the worse. The Libya and Tunisia debacles have led to Egypt which led to Benghazi which has led to Syria. The common thread is a doctrine that the U.S. president is following to empower Islamists who promise America “democracy” and non-violence. But “Islamist democracy” and “Islamist non-violence” are oxymorons. Obama buys into these contradictions as if they were real possibilities. Following the dictates of Syrian “rebels” and having them direct American policy is like taking advice at face value from those who sent our airliners into the World Trade Center on 9/11. Selective indignation and political correctness have amounted to a complete political and military debacle in the U.S. which also involves and endangers other stakeholders. Every attempt is being made to isolate one act of chemical warfare after a series of chemical attacks in a country (and region) where they have experienced the same for many decades under the Assad family dictatorship — without much objection from the world community or the U.N. Questions need to be asked. There are too many contradictions, inconsistencies, befuddled thinking and lies to enumerate, but here are a few:

Evidence that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was directly involved in the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where Americans including U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens were killed, continues to mount.

First, on June 26, 2013, I produced and partially translated what purported to be an internal Libyan governmental memo which was leaked and picked up by many Arabic websites. According to this document, the Muslim Brotherhood, including now ousted President Morsi, played a direct role in the Benghazi consulate attack. “Based on confessions derived from some of those arrested at the scene,” asserted the report, six people, “all of them Egyptians” from the jihad group Ansar al-Sharia (Supporters of Islamic Law), were arrested. During interrogations, these Egyptian jihadi cell members:

While the Middle East combusts, threatening vital US interests, the US attempts to clip the wings of Israel — the only reliable, predictable, stable, effective, democratic and unabashedly pro-US firefighter in the region.

Western policy-makers and public opinion molders welcomed the 2011 riots on the Arab Street as an Arab Spring, a people’s revolution and a transition toward democracy. However, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria have demonstrated that the Arab Street is experiencing an Arab Tsunami and a transition towards intensified chaos, totally unrelated to the Palestinian issue, which has been a regional sideshow. In fact, Alexei Pushkov, Chairman of the International Committee in Russia’s Duma, stated on July 4, 2013: “the ongoing events in Egypt confirm that the so-called Arab Spring has led not to democratic renewal but to chaos… We can see this in Egypt, in Libya, in Syria, and in Iraq… The events in Egypt show that there can’t be a quick and gentle transition from an authoritarian regime to political democracy. There can’t be such a transition in the Arab Middle East countries…”

The Islamic jihad against Christians in Nigeria is proving to be the most barbaric. A new report states that 70% of Christians killed around the world in 2012 were killed in the African nation. Among some of the atrocities committed in March alone, at least 41 people were killed in a suicide bomb attack at a bus station in a predominantly Christian neighborhood. According to the Christian Association of Nigeria, these attacks “were a signpost of the intended extermination of Christians and Christianity from northern Nigeria.”

The terrorist attack in Benghazi is far more disturbing than previously thought. Although it has not been reported in the U.S. media, the possibility exists that the Egyptian government may have played an operational role in the attack. YouTube videos of the terrorist strike raise a serious problem that only an Arabic speaker would detect: some of the terrorists are speaking in the Egyptian dialect of the Arabic language.

On this Memorial Day, it’s important to remember that the very same U.S. policies that created al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s—leading to the horrific attacks of 9/11—are today allowing al-Qaeda to metastasize all around the Muslim world. As in the 80s, these new terrorist cells are quietly gathering strength now, and are sure to deliver future terror strikes that will make 9/11 seem like child’s play.

To understand this dire prediction, we must first examine the United States’ history of empowering Islamic jihadis—only to be attacked by those same jihadis many years later—and the chronic shortsightedness of American policymakers, whose policies are based on their brief tenure, not America’s long-term wellbeing.

In the 1980s, the U.S. supported Afghani rebels—among them the jihadis—to repel the Soviets. Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and countless foreign jihadis journeyed to Afghanistan to form a base of training and planning—the first prerequisite of the jihad, as delineated in Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones.

It’s well known that whenever jihadis attack and slaughter innocent people — especially Christians — the Obama administration tries to ignore or whitewash. Lesser known, however, is that whenever foreign governments try to subdue the jihadis, the Obama administration objects and calls for the “human rights” of the terrorists.

Nigerian warplanes struck militant camps in the northeast on Friday [5/17] in a major push against an Islamist insurgency, drawing a sharp warning from the United States to respect human rights and not harm civilians. Troops used jets and helicopters to bombard targets in their biggest offensive since the Boko Haram group launched a revolt almost four years ago to establish a breakaway Islamic state and one military source said at least 30 militants had been killed. But three days after President Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency in the northeast, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry issued a strongly worded statement saying: “We are … deeply concerned by credible allegations that Nigerian security forces are committing gross human rights violations, which, in turn, only escalate the violence and fuel extremism.

Remember all the hoopla the Obama administration engaged in after helping Libya’s “freedom fighters” oust (and sodomize and murder) the nation’s former president, Muammar Gaddafi? Remember the rationale used by Obama to justify using the U.S. military to help Libya’s “opposition”? In his March 28, 2011, speech, he spoke of “our responsibilities to our fellow human beings,” adding that not assisting them “would have been a betrayal of who we are.”

Although it was common knowledge that al-Qaeda and other fiercely anti-American forces were involved in the Libyan jihad, this did not shake Obama’s “responsibilities” to his “fellow human beings.” Predictably, the thanks the U.S. received was an al-Qaeda attack on the American consulate in Benghazi and the murders of four American officials, including Ambassador Chris Stevens (an attack the Obama administration tried to frame as a product of an amateur YouTube video that had “offended” Muslims).

Mr. Smith characterized the Obama administration’s Middle East policy as one of “extrication” from the region. The major problem with this policy, he argued, is that “vacuums are filled by other people, and not always filled by friendly powers.”

Nor has the administration explained why it no longer deems the Middle East a region of vital interest. If, for example, the U.S. becomes a net exporter of energy in the near future and is less reliant on Middle Eastern oil, the administration has yet to make this case with the public. Instead, its policy of “leading from behind,” adopted during the Libyan intervention, is a prime example of the vacuum left since the toppling of Qaddafi as the decision to leave the newly elected Libyan government to fend for itself has led to instability.

Tunisia, one of the most secular Arab countries in modern times—and the first country to experience the “Arab Spring”—was also recently the first Arab country to experience a high level political Islamic assassination since the Arab Spring began. The BBC explains:

Tunisian opposition politician Chokri Belaid has been shot dead outside his home in the capital, Tunis. Relatives say Mr Belaid was shot in the neck and head on his way to work. He was a prominent secular opponent of the moderate [sic] Islamist-led government and his murder has sparked protests around the country, with police firing tear gas to disperse angry crowds.

Four foreign Christians—including one who holds American-Swedish citizenship—were arrested days ago in Libya. According to the Guardian, their crime is arousing “suspicion of being missionaries and distributing Christian literature, a charge that could carry the death penalty.”

Apparently the four Christians had “contracted a local printer to produce pamphlets explaining Christianity.” Proselytizing to Muslims—that is, preaching to them another religion—was banned even under the late Col. Muammar Gaddafi.

In the near-century that the United States has been a great power, it has developed some original and sophisticated foreign policy tools. Examples include the Marshall Plan, special forces, and satellite imaging. At the same time, the country’s naiveté remains firmly in place. For example, the notion persists that government staff are “particularly qualified to [handle a problem] because they knew nothing about it.” (For details, see my analysis at “American Know-Nothing Diplomacy.”)

The persistent belief that training and equipping foreign troops imbues them with American political and ethical values, making them allies of the United States, offers another sign of innocence. Some examples of this delusional policy in recent decades:

In the conflict taking place in Africa involving France’s military force in Mali there are no UN high commissions, no special “raconteurs” and human rights tribunals demonizing and vilifying France, no international courts filing suits against France, no leftist groups screaming about the disproportionate use of force by France, and no Obama administration telling the world that they want dialogue to begin between France and Al Qaeda as soon as possible and violence to end immediately.

No, that kind of behavior and foreign policy is reserved only for Israel when it is directly attacked by Islamist terrorists who happen to be a lot better equipped than Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM). The Maghreb is most of Northwest Africa to the west of Egypt.

The expression, “With friends like you who needs enemies?” is an apt summary of a major problem for U.S. foreign policy during Obama’s second term.

Here’s the issue: a number of supposed allies of the United States don’t act as friends. In fact, they are major headaches, often subverting U.S. goals and interests. But to avoid conflict and, for Obama, to look successful to the domestic audience, Washington pretends that everything is fine.

Consider, for example, Pakistan. The United States has given billions of dollars to that country in exchange for supposedly helping keeping the lid on Afghanistan — and especially to ensure the Taliban does not return to power — and to fight terrorism, especially al-Qaida.